Eight Reasons It’s OK You’re Not Famous

So you wanna be famous? Understandable: It's one of those human urges like eating and mating. But there are many reasons your normal life is way better. Such as ...

2

1

1. You’re developing actual skills

Unlike famous people, who spend their days obsessively molding and marketing their public persona, your time is devoted to honing legit talents and interests that will help you find lasting success and happiness. “Fame should be a side effect of having talent; it shouldn’t be a lifestyle,” says W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens. “Doing things for joy or love or connectedness with other people is what makes you fulfilled.” If you’re amazing at something and want to share it, great. But you’ll get a lot more out of it if you do it because you want to learn and improve—not sell tickets to a show called You.

2. You can pick your nose in public

Not that you should, but it’s nice to have options. Become a microcelebrity Web phenom and you’ll soon find your privacy vanishes in real life, too—something model turned fashion blogger Audrey Kitching, 27, realized when, at an event with singer Demi Lovato, dozens of young adoring fans were screaming her name. “Now I have to look and act a certain way in public because I never know who’s watching,” Kitching says. Long-term, you risk immortalizing yourself saying, doing, wearing something you’ll regret later. Remember your OMG-I-love-Nick-Lachey phase? Yeah. Online there are no take-backs. Cue the awkward job interviews and Match.com dates.

3. You have true friends

“I thought becoming famous would mean people really liked me, but it doesn’t work like that,” says author Julia Allison, 32, who once appeared on the cover of Wired as the poster child for online self-promotion. YouTube sensation Jenna Marbles also admitted in a recent interview that she has few friends and rarely goes out. “Racking up likes pumps up your self-esteem for a few moments, but it’s fleeting. You have to keep throwing the bucket in the well to sustain the high,” Campbell says. Your flesh-and-blood pals don’t need constant coddling and they still have your back.

4. You get to be you, all the time

To be successful online usually requires carefully and consistently cultivating the version of yourself that you want to sell—”quirky you” or “arty you” or “funny you.” “This constant focus on performing for others sounds exhausting to me,” says Joshua Gamson, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of San Francisco, who studies celebrity culture. “It can make it hard to figure out who you really are.” You’re a mishmash of a lot of qualities—why would you limit yourself to just one?

5. You don’t have a shelf life

“With fame,” says Theresa Senft, Ph.D., a professor at New York University and an expert in microfame, “you’re judged by your appearance, treated like an object and given the expiration date of chopped meat.” (Basically, the plight of anyone who’s ever been on The Bachelor.) In your 20s and 30s, you should be focused on the future, not worrying that your best years are behind you. It’s like the cool-kid-in-high-school thing: At the time, being überpopular was everything, but now aren’t you glad you didn’t peak at 18?

6. You set your schedule

If you have a loyal Web fan base, you might as well forget about that little thing called vacation: You, and you alone, must engage your followers, which is a 24/7 job. Fashion blogger Kitching occasionally fantasizes about stepping away from the endless string of tweets, posts, comments, grams, shares and pins necessary to maintain her fame. “I’m really into cooking,” she says. “I sometimes think if I could open a caf&eacute; somewhere and wear a T-shirt and sneakers, and not worry about how I look, that would be awesome.”

7. You don’t get hate mail

It’s nice to be seen and heard, but the pipeline flows both ways—and what comes back at you can bite. Hard. “Look, once you put yourself out there, you open yourself up to criticism that you can’t control or manage,” says psychiatrist Catherine Birndorf, M.D., SELF’s mental health expert. “We all want to be liked. So even though the opinions of strangers shouldn’t matter, guess what? They hurt.”

8. You’re having a moment

Yes, regular you. Think about who’s cool in pop culture right now: Hannah on Girls and Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation. Ordinary—as in talented, weird, smart, flawed, fascinating—is the new It quality. And you’ve got it. So cash in on that.